French Omelet
4 eggs 4 tablespoons milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 2 tablespoons butter Beat eggs slightly, just enough to blend yolks and whites, add the milk and seasonings. Put butter in hot omelet pan; when melted, turn in the mixture; as it cooks, prick and pick up with a fork until the whole is of creamy consistency. Place on hotter part of range that it may brown quickly underneath. Fold, and turn on hot platter. Omelet with Croûtons 1 cup bread cut in 1/3 inch cubes
A rolled French omelet in the Fannie Farmer manner, cooked fast in butter and folded rather than puffed with beaten whites. The transcription has lost the top of the ingredient list, so the two main quantities have to be inferred.
- Missing quantitiesEggs and milk are called for in the method but their amounts have been dropped from the list; only salt, pepper and butter survive. The book's standard French omelet is built on four eggs with about four tablespoons of milk, but that is a reasonable inference rather than what this page says.
- "Omelet pan"A heavy, well-seasoned shallow pan with sloping sides, 8 to 10 inches for a four-egg omelet. A modern nonstick or carbon steel skillet of that size does the same job; a wide flat-bottomed pan spreads the eggs too thin to fold.
- "Hotter part of range"On a coal or wood range the surface had zones, and the cook slid the pan toward the firebox for a final blast. On a gas or induction burner, simply raise the heat for the last fifteen to twenty seconds.
- Beat only to blendThe instruction to beat "slightly, just enough to blend yolks and whites" is the hinge. Over-beating incorporates air and turns this into a fluffy omelet with a drier, spongier crumb rather than the dense creamy roll intended.
- Prick and pick upThis is the same motion as modern stirring with a fork or spatula: keep lifting the setting curd so uncooked egg runs underneath. It should take one to two minutes, not five.
- Creamy, not dryPull the pan when the surface is still visibly moist. Carryover heat finishes it on the platter, and an omelet cooked until uniformly firm in the pan arrives dry.
- CroûtonsThe fragment ends at "1 cup bread cut in 1/3 inch cubes," before any instruction for them survives; in the fuller recipe croûtons of this kind are browned in butter and added before the omelet is folded. Add them at the last moment so they stay crisp.
- YieldA four-egg omelet of this kind serves two modestly or one generously. Making two separate omelets beats scaling up to eight eggs in one pan.
The distinction this recipe quietly enforces — French omelet, folded and creamy, as against the puffy or "foamy" omelet where the whites are beaten separately and the pan finished in the oven — was a standing point of order in late nineteenth-century American cookery instruction. Fannie Farmer's book was published in 1896, and the omelet suited a household still cooking on a coal range: a few cheap ingredients, no margin for inattention, and an outcome that visibly recorded whether the cook had judged the pan correctly. The list of variations that follows in the original — croûtons here, and elsewhere cheese, ham, jelly, tomato — reflects the period habit of teaching one master method and then hanging a dozen named dishes off it.